Pineapple Drive

Project overview

Extremely versatile drive, well known for giving the “Brown Sound,” the tone and style of distortion made famous by Eddie Van Halen. Featuring two separate styles of gain structure, a powerful mid contour (from scooped to mid hump) control and a control that squeezes out every ounce of tone from your guitar.

Introduction

Brian Wampler has developed this circuit in order to recreate the classic “Brown sound” tone associated with Eddie Van Halen, without losing the versatility, being able to deliver from mild overdrive to extreme gain and everything in between.

The Pineapple drive is a recreation of the Wampler’s original Pinnacle, featuring two separate gain structure styles, a powerful mid contour (from scooped to mid boost) that compliments perfectly with the Tone control in order to dial your perfect sound.

Including a booster switch that could be wired as a standard DPDT toggle or as stompswitch for more versatility and a bright switch (originally called “Vintage/Modern”), this board is capable of a wide range of tonal versatility.

This version includes two trimmers to bias the non-cascade JFET depending on your taste, or just to place a 22k resistor instead of the trimmers just as the original. It also features pads to use standard through-hole J201 or the more available and reliable SMD version.

Controls

The Pineapple drive has the same controls as most overdrive or distortion effects but including some interesting and useful improvements:

• Tone controls the tone response of the effect. The center point (12:00) is flat. When turned to the left, it adds bass, and when turned to the right, it boosts treble.
• Gain: Controls the amount of gain going from the first cascade stages to the second one.
• Volume controls the overall output of the effect.
• Contour: Acts as Mids control, from scooped to the left, flat at 12:00, and boosted to the right.

In addition to the 4 control knobs, the project features two toggles:

• Bright: Enable/disable the C14 6.8nf capacitor after the tone knob. It’s called modern/vintage switch on the Wampler’s original
• Boost: Engages R3 and R9 from the first and second cascade stage to ground in order to act as a gain boost.

For further analysis on this circuit take a look at this thread on Free Stomp Boxes Forum.

For any technical questions regarding this build don’t forget to check out our Facebook Group and our forum at Free Stomp Boxes.

Pineapple Drive – Building Docs v1.0

Pineapple Drive – Drilling Template